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Real-time strategy titles have long been the province of PC gamers who find the very concept of an RTS on a console tantamount to heresy. Fortunately strategy game developers suffer from no such parochialism and have been working hard for years to figure out an elegant way to bring the fun of creating and killing millions of toy soldiers to console systems with all their deep strategy intact. The latest brave crew to take a swing at this monumental task are the developers over at Hellbent Games. We've been playing the heck out of their Xbox 360 translation of Chris Taylor's epic-scale RTS for a while now, and they may have come closer than any developer ever has.

Console gamers unfamiliar with Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games should know that Supreme Commander is the spiritual sequel to Total Annihilation, widely considered one of the best RTS games ever made. Supreme Commander's basic premise is that an "Infinite War" has been raging across the galaxy for the last 1,000 years. The three branches of the human race -- the United Earth Federation, the Cybran and the alien-influences Aeon -- have been pledged to their opponents' mutual destruction for so long they barely know any other way of life is possible. Now, however, a new factor has come into play and the player, depending on which side he or she chooses, will be instrumental in seeing which faction comes out on top.

The real focus of Supreme Commander, though, is giving players the ability to create, command and control literally thousands of mechanized soldiers on foot, in tanks, on ship and in the air, throwing them into combat against an equally numerous foe. Everything in Supreme Commander operates on an awesomely epic scale with players able to build huge bases that stretch across big chunks of the landscape. These bases then produce dozens of different units that perform a variety of functions ranging from artillery units to foot soldiers to transport vehicles to fight-bombers to gigantic experimental war machines that will actually step on and crush other units during battles. Battles in Supreme Commander are chaotic riots with dozens of different units all battling one another, shooting enemies, supporting their friends and following the commands of their fairly intelligent individual unit AI to blast their opponents into hot shards of metal.

The trick, of course, is how the player controls such a vast army. Based on our play time so far, this is where the developers at Hellbent Games seem to have done an excellent job translating the mouse-and-keyboard-centered control scheme of the PC to the Xbox controller. That key is the controller's d-pad and the use of the left and right analog sticks. The pad is used to select between three different flywheels filled with commands. Command selections can be made quickly and easily using the left stick. The right stick is used to zoom in and out, changing the player's point-of-view from a down-and-dirty view of the action to a "God's-eye" perspective in which everything on the battlefield is reduced to symbol-laden dots. Judicious use of the "A" button to select already-created units and the right and left bumper keys to control build queues complete the control scheme. It sounds complicated when described but is actually pretty easy to use.